Say it quietly, but 2025 could be the best year for the box office since before the pandemic
An incoming slew of sequels (shock!) might be the boost movie theaters need.
After another pretty solid weekend at the box office — where Taylor Swift’s marketing-event-meets-extended-music-video “The Official Release Party of a Showgirl” won out, having taken a whopping $33 million at home and a further $13 million overseas — whispers are circulating that 2025 could become the biggest box office year of the postpandemic era.
One blockbuster after another
With a sequel-packed slate in the final months of the year, “Wicked” and “Zootopia” follow-ups land in November and “Avatar: Fire and Ash” drops the week before Christmas, it would take some pretty big flops for this year not to become the first to break through the $9 billion barrier since 2019. Indeed, 2025 is already roughly tracking the previous postpandemic watermark set two years ago, even before we welcome witches, cartoon animal cops, and the Na’vi back to America’s silver screens.
Thanks to huge hits earlier in the year like “A Minecraft Movie,” which was jockeyed into theaters in April and went on to gross about $424 million in North America, and “Lilo and Stitch,” which came a month later and grossed almost exactly the same, per Box Office Mojo figures, the total domestic tally for the year had already ballooned to almost $6.5 billion by the end of September.
There have been a handful of standout success stories in the world of original filmmaking, not least from the horror genre, where “Weapons” and “Sinners” both captured moviegoers’ attention. However, this year, like most recent ones before it, has been broadly defined by studios cashing in on old ideas, with just one entry that isn’t a remake, a follow-up, or a work based on existing intellectual property in the top 10 highest-grossing movies of 2025... even before the upcoming trifecta of part twos and threes.
Of course, if you adjust for inflation — considering ticket prices are 20% to 25% higher than they were in 2019 — the big picture figures don’t look so dazzling.
